Britain's new MI6 chief caught in Facebook scandal

By David Harrison, London

THE new head of MI6, Sir John Sawers, is at the centre of a security breach after his wife published family holiday photographs and other personal details on the Facebook website.

Sir John, currently Britain's ambassador to the United Nations, began his career with MI6 but has spent many years as a diplomat.

Sir John Sawers.Credit:KEITH BEDFORD

He is due to take up his post as chief of the Secret Intelligence Service, in charge of Britain's spying operations abroad, in November.

But his wife's posting on the social networking site has exposed potentially compromising details about where they live and work, their friends and where they go on holiday.

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Lady Shelley Sawers put no privacy protection on the account, meaning that any of Facebook's 200 million users could see the entries, no matter where they were in the world.

The lapse revealed the couple's friendship with senior diplomats and actors.

It appears the Foreign Office had not vetted the information that Sir John and his family were putting on the internet.

Lady Sawers posted photographs of the family's holidays and gave details of the location of the family's flat in London and the whereabouts of their three children and of Sir John's parents.

On June 16, the day Sir John's MI6 appointment was announced, she posted 19 pictures of the couple on holiday with their friends in England's West Country earlier that month.

The following day she added a further 26 pictures, including one of Sir John playing on the beach in his swimming trunks, posing with his wife and children and chatting with friends and his mother.

Lady Sawers also revealed that the new intelligence chief's brother-in-law is an associate of David Irving, the controversial right-wing historian, according to a report in The Mail on Sunday. The material was wiped from Facebook after the newspaper alerted the Foreign Office to the extraordinary lapse.

Lady Sawers' Facebook "friends" have also used the account to send messages of congratulations to Sir John on his new job, with one relative joking that he will now be known as "Uncle C".

Senior politicians said the security lapse raised serious doubts about Sir John's suitability to head the intelligence service, and raised questions over whether an outsider should have been appointed to such a sensitive role.

Edward Davey, the Liberal Democrat spokesman on foreign affairs, called on Prime Minister Gordon Brown to launch an inquiry into whether the Facebook disclosures had compromised Sir John's ability to take up his MI6 position.